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New York Times
14-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Anne Kaufman Schneider, 99, Ardent Keeper of Her Father's Plays, Dies
Anne Kaufman Schneider, who shepherded the plays of her father, George S. Kaufman, a titan of 20th-century American theatrical wit, into the 21st century with an acerbic sagacity all her own, died on Thursday at her home in Manhattan. She was 99. Her executor, Laurence Maslon, confirmed her death. 'Headstrong girls are difficult,' Ms. Kaufman Schneider once told The New York Times, 'but that was the source of my good relationship with my father. And it started early. Because there wasn't any baby talk. We went to the theater together starting when I was 4. Now I have made his work my agenda in life.' George Kaufman's stellar career as a hit-making playwright and stage director included winning two Pulitzer Prizes — one, in 1937, for 'You Can't Take It With You,' a comedy he created with his most constant collaborator, Moss Hart; the other, in 1932, for 'Of Thee I Sing,' a satirical political musical co-written with Morrie Ryskind to a score by George and Ira Gershwin. Even so, after his death in 1961 at the age of 71, Kaufman was a hard sell for theatrical revivals. 'Very little happened at all,' Ms. Kaufman Schneider once recalled, 'until Ellis Rabb revived 'You Can't Take It With You' for the A.P.A./Phoenix Theater in 1965. Ellis proved that these are classic American plays.' (Founded by Mr. Rabb, an actor and director, the A.P.A., formally the Association of Producing Artists, was a Broadway entity notable for mounting revivals after it merged with the Phoenix Theater, another Broadway house.) Ms. Kaufman Schneider proceeded to oversee her father's renaissance over the next 50-plus years — a term of service that outdistanced his own living stewardship of his career. She encouraged countless regional theater productions and helped steer two of them to Broadway: Mr. Rabb's 'You Can't Take It With You,' which originated in Ann Arbor, Mich., and a revival of Kaufman and Edna Ferber's 'The Royal Family,' which was first presented at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, N.J.; it reached Broadway in December 1975. She also helped nurture a 'Kaufmania' festival at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., for her father's centennial in 1989 and a major Lincoln Center revival of Kaufman and Ferber's 'Dinner at Eight' in 2002. 'The wisecracking woman who is smarter than all the men,' was how Ms. Kaufman Schneider defined a classic Kaufman heroine. 'Which in some ways is what I modeled myself after — I hope unconsciously. That's the kind of woman he admired.'' She was born on June 23, 1925, and adopted three months later by Kaufman, then the drama editor of The New York Times, and his wife, Beatrice (Bakrow) Kaufman, who was known as Bea, a literary figure in her own right as an editor and tastemaker. Kaufman, in 1918, had begun writing plays on the side, almost always with collaborators, particularly Marc Connelly, another future Pulitzer winner, who scripted five Broadway comedies with him in four years, including 'Merton of the Movies' in 1922 and 'Beggar on Horseback' in 1924. (Kaufman wrote only one play solo, 'The Butter and Egg Man,' which was also a hit, in 1925.) A notoriously aloof germaphobe who washed his hands after any contact with another human being, Kaufman was hardly a likely candidate for fatherhood. His marriage to the conversely gregarious and vigorously social Bea Kaufman had become a loving but chaste one after she suffered an early miscarriage; both openly pursued extramarital affairs. Into this odd family ménage entered Anne, who grew up at a remove from her parents, attentively raised instead by a succession of foreign-born governesses, nannies and maids, as biographies of Kaufman and interviews with Ms. Kaufman Schneider have attested. Her mother called her Button and her father called her Poke, an eliding of 'slow poke.' Her most regular family contact with them was in stagy 'goodnights' at their celebrity-studded dinner parties. Little Anne discovered that sharp exit quips made her father laugh with paternal pride. On Sundays, the help's day off, her mother handed her over to her father with the admonition: Do something with her. On his own, Kaufman did mainly two things: make theater and play cards, and he excelled at both. He took his daughter to his bridge club, where she stoically looked on, developing what would be a lifelong aversion to card games. He would also take her to the theater, where their deepest bond was born. Anne attended five prestigious private schools in succession: Walden, Lincoln, Todhunter and Dalton in Manhattan and Holmquist in Pennsylvania, near the family's country house. She largely grew up in a small apartment adjacent to their palatial home at 200 West 58th Street in Manhattan; her parents had acquired it just for her upbringing. She later lived with them in a series of elegant East Side addresses. Admitted to the University of Chicago in 1943 at age 18, she instead married a young New York Times reporter named John Booth. When, during World War II, he was shipped overseas as a soldier six months later, she moved back home with her parents, and when Mr. Booth returned from military duty, she divorced him. She married Bruce Colen, a magazine editor, in 1947 and had a daughter, Beatrice, with him the next year before divorcing him, too. In 1960, she married Irving Schneider, the general manager for the theatrical producer Irene Mayer Selznick. He had been an assistant stage manager on the original 1934 production of Kaufman and Hart's play 'Merrily We Roll Along' (later adapted by Stephen Sondheim as a musical). That marriage lasted until Mr. Schneider's death in 1997. After bonding with the stage actress Eva Le Gallienne during her starring run in the 1975 revival of 'The Royal Family,' Ms. Kaufman Schneider became her devoted friend and constant companion until Ms. Le Gallienne's death in 1991 at age 92. Ms. Kaufman Schneider's daughter, Beatrice Colen Cronin, died in 1999. Two grandsons survive. Of all her father's many collaborators — including Edna Ferber, Ring Lardner and John P. Marquand — Moss Hart was his favorite, Ms. Kaufman Schneider said. 'I think they were very much mentor and apprentice, even father and son,' she said in a 2022 interview with The Times. Ms. Kaufman Schneider first met Hart's future wife, the singer, actress and later arts administrator Kitty Carlisle, on the set of the Marx Brothers movie 'A Night At the Opera' (1935); Ms. Carlisle was co-starring in the film, which George Kaufman had co-written. The two women reconnected when Ms. Carlisle married Mr. Hart in 1946, becoming, in Ms. Kaufman Schneider's words, 'inseparable,' particularly after the deaths of both men in 1961. Their friendship grew into something of a road show in their later years, as they teamed up for speaking engagements all over the world on the subject of Kaufman and Hart. 'Just two girls with six names,' Ms. Kaufman Schneider liked to say. 'I am very grateful to Anne,' Ms. Carlisle Hart once told The Times. 'Anne has taken on the major burden of the plays, their second life.' In 2004, due in no small measure to his daughter's restorative efforts, George S. Kaufman formally entered the theatrical pantheon with the Library of America's publication of 'Kaufman & Co.', a collection of nine of his collaborative comic masterworks. Still, 'for Anne, in the end, nothing made her happier than seeing her father's plays in front of audiences,' said her executor, Mr. Maslon, an N.Y.U. arts professor and theater scholar who edited 'Kaufman & Co.' and who, with the actor David Pittu, is an executor of the George S. Kaufman Literary Trust. ''Get 'em up!' was Anne's watch cry.' Preserving her father's plays allowed Ms. Kaufman Schneider also to preserve the love that they each had sometimes found hard to express. 'Well, sir, here we are again,' she wrote on Kaufman's 51st birthday, when she was nearly 16. 'Every year at this time I want to write you a really nice letter and every year I'm just as much at a loss as I was the year before. In between times I can make up gobs of them — I remember things we do together; funny things you say; but those aren't reasons for writing people birthday letters — those are just a few reasons for liking you. Others are hard to say — hard even to define in thinking terms to oneself.'
Yahoo
07-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Born Against
Where I part company with Daniel McCarthy—one half of our recent Dispatch debate on Trump's kooky Cabinet picks—is at the very beginning, with his premise that the conservative movement could use more figures such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard because they are 'skeptics.' But they aren't skeptics—they are cranks. Kennedy is not nearly as skeptical as he should be about every imbecilic new-age health fad and conspiracy theory to come in over the transom, whereas Gabbard could stand to be a bit more skeptical about the foreign-policy analysis of, say, Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin's sundry factota on the American right. As McCarthy notes, the 'conservative movement was born in the 20th century in a bout of populist skepticism.' I think of the first issue of National Review, the cover of which advertised, among other offerings, Of Thee I Sing author Morrie Ryskind's anti-psychotherapy broadside, headlined 'They'll never get me on that couch!' The article got better billing than pieces from Frank Meyer, James Burnham, Willmoore Kendall, and Russell Kirk, whose work is nonetheless better-remembered than is Ryskind's political journal, though Ryskind also wrote Animal Crackers and A Night at the Opera—so he didn't have much to prove. William F. Buckley Jr. was a funny kind of anti-elitist—I mean the kind who played Bach preludes on his harpsichord on his yacht and wintered at a chateau outside Gstaad where he entertained everyone from Princess Grace to Iggy Pop. But he also was the man who famously declared that he'd prefer to live under the rule of the first 2,000 people to appear in the Boston phone book than under that of the 2,000 members of Harvard's faculty. In spite of its evangelical and at times apocalyptic character, American conservatism is not so much born again as born against. Whereas most national traditions of conservatism have been directed at the maintenance of the social consensus and its major organs—think of the British Tories and the monarchy—American conservatism was born at the end of World War II and has made a career out of opposition to the status quo: It is, in that sense, the baby boomer of political movements. In 1955, when Buckley and his fellow travelers launched National Review (long the flagship American conservative magazine, where I was an editor and writer for 15 years), their project began with differentiating themselves from those who were comfortable with the social and political consensus of the time, in particular from the New Deal and from those Republicans who had made their peace with it, especially Dwight Eisenhower. Borrowing (perhaps unintentionally) slang that was bubbling up just then from the jazz world, of all places, Buckley declared: 'Our principles are round, and Eisenhower is square.' His first order of business, as he wrote in a letter to the writer Max Eastman, was to 'read Dwight Eisenhower out of the conservative movement.' Buckley did not think much of Donald Trump, whom he accurately identified in a 2000 essay as both a 'narcissist' and a 'demagogue.' But it is impossible to miss certain parallels in their careers: Both found their first political success not in besting Democrats but in plaguing Republicans who were, in their judgment, insufficiently radical: Beyond recognizing the value of the publicity running for office would bring (something else he had in common with Trump), Buckley ran for mayor of New York City in 1965 not in order to defeat the Democratic nominee but in the hope of delivering the race to the Democrat by cannibalizing votes for John Lindsay, the despised liberal Republican candidate. Trump, in a similar way, won the hearts of the angry and adversarial right by heaping scorn on relatively moderate figures such as Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor. And Trump had, as a matter of curious fact, been a campaign donor to Hillary Clinton, his eventual opponent in the 2016 general election. (Amusingly, Trump also was a donor to Kamala Harris when she was California's attorney general.) With two important exceptions—Ronald Reagan in 1984 and, ironically, Dwight Eisenhower in 1956—National Review has never offered its endorsement to an incumbent Republican president, and it has at times endorsed against them, e.g., preferring John Ashbrook to Richard Nixon in 1972. Whereas British conservatives have a literal establishment to defend—the established church, the monarchy, etc.—American conservatives have always been fundamentally anti-establishment. And American conservatism is, paradoxically, a relatively new thing: As Peggy Noonan noted in her obituary of Buckley, prior to the 1950s there was hardly any self-conscious American conservatism at all, only something that had 'been calling itself 'voting Republican' or 'not liking the New Deal.'' Understanding the adversarial character of the American conservative movement—the people Buckley called 'radical conservatives' in opposition to 'the well-fed right'—is the key to understanding the continuities between the conservatism of Buckley and Reagan and the rightism of Trump, J.D. Vance, et al. And there are important continuities. There are fundamental breaks, too. Ironically—forgive the repetition, but the word is necessary—the creed of the right in the Trump era is not opposition to the New Deal but opposition to opposition to the New Deal, including an adamantine refusal to consider urgently needed reforms either to Social Security, the most significant New Deal entitlement, or to Medicaid, the most important New Deal echo in Lyndon Johnson's so-called Great Society. The limited-government, libertarian-leaning philosophy of Buckley's anti-New Dealers is derided in today's Republican Party as soulless neoliberalism, Davos-ism, or Paul Ryan-ism. In that sense, today's Republicans sound a little like those disappointed progressives who lambasted the corporate-friendly policy and rhetoric of the Bill Clinton years. (One of those disappointed progressives was Bill Clinton, who complained that he was a hostage to the bond market and that he was, in effect, serving out Eisenhower's third term.) The bit about 'not liking the New Deal' has gone by the wayside, and only the 'voting Republican' part remains. The adversarial character of American conservatism, particularly in its more populist expressions, is useful in understanding the current Republican attitude for crankery and crackpottery, which has seen Trump elevate such figures as television quack Mehmet Oz and anti-vaccine conspiracy kook RFK Jr., while reaching into the worlds of Fox News and professional wrestling for other high officers. It is worth noting that this isn't the first national convulsion we've had over fluoride—the excitable gentlemen of the John Birch Society made an issue of it in an earlier epoch, and their paranoia about the state of their 'precious bodily fluids' was satirized in Dr. Strangelove in 1964, when it already was old news. And while the political lines are not always straightforward, Elon Musk's interest in 'Pizzagate,' a conspiracy theory about Democratic pedophile-Satanists operating a torture chamber beneath a Washington-area pizza shop, is very much of a piece with the 'Satanic panic' of the Reagan era, which included both earnest congressional testimony about preposterous, bloody fictions and, of course, money-grubbing hackwork such as The Satan Seller, a hoax memoir written by evangelical activist Mike Warnke, whose tales of high government officials engaged in child-abusing Luciferian conspiracies are the blueprint for today's digital Trumpism. The same evangelical milieu that nurtured phenomena such as the John Birch Society in the Eisenhower years and the Satanic panic in the Reagan years has, no great surprise, proved fertile ground for the conspiracy-addled Trump movement. Evangelicals are to the mainstream Protestant churches as Trumpists are to the Republican Party: an alienated faction that eventually grew to be much larger and more important than the mainstream entities from which it had been estranged. The two inevitably go together. And from that we have the marriage of the adversarial—whatever Eisenhower and the other 'square' characters support, the radical conservatives must oppose—to the apocalyptic. The bestselling nonfiction book in the decade leading up to Ronald Reagan's election in 1980 wasn't The Conscience of a Conservative or The Road to Serfdom—it was Hal Lindsey's pop-Apocalypse sensation, The Late Great Planet Earth. And if I may be forgiven one final use of the word 'ironic,' I cannot think of how else to describe the fact that the dysfunction of modern American conservatism, with its I Love Lucy nostalgia and its detestation of 'globalists' and 'cosmopolitans,' arises from the our conservatism's being spiritually and historically deracinated. Unlike its British counterpart, American conservatism does not have institutions such as a national church or monarchy to which to cling; unlike the man who in my mind has a good claim to being the founding father of American conservatism, John Adams, and the other men of his generation, most contemporary evangelicals and political conservatives do not have a coherent political philosophy rooted in a meaningful classical education or the benefit of an intellectually rigorous religious life in which to ground themselves—it is a very long fall from New England's Puritans to today's megachurch populists. And so they have become 'conservatives' who are in no way conservative. Instead, they have taken up a kind of low right-wing revolutionism, flitting from enthusiasm to enthusiasm as they flit from enemy to enemy, with opposition as their only constant and disgust as their north star. And it is opposition and disgust, not 'skepticism,' that have made right-wing stars of Kennedy and Gabbard. I do not know what to call that, but 'conservatism' cannot be the right word.
